FightCodeGame ?

Cool, thanks for the info MN. It's worth noting this game is really young - the first version was built from scratch in a month for a GitHub hacking contest near the end of 2012. They also replied to me on Twitter that some new stuff is coming: "we have some feats in the oven for advanced bots: independent queues for radar, cannon and tank; data storage for machine learning"

I'm curious to see how it does. The whole web-ness and feel of it all really impresses me, and I could see a lot of people trying it that wouldn't have bothered to download Robocode. But at the same time, being stuck with the web interface for all your running and testing and unstable rankings might make it hard to retain power users and maintain a passionate community. Support for local and batch battles would be nice, though it wouldn't be my top priority (yet) as a dev either. It also seems like the gameplay needs some work to approach the depth of Robocode, but it sounds like they're working on that.

I meant the secrets of how successful it is, not how to beat it. I am trying my hand at nanomelee, but I haven't had much success. (My robot TestMelee is a really crappy derivative of Infinity.) DoctorBob says it has NanoAndrew's movement, but it looks like there must be a little something more. I wondered if you had ever seen DB's code, or heard something from the author.

His code cannot be completely decompiled as he obfiscated it, but if you look around a bit, there are ways of figuring out what he did. Honestly, you can reverse engineer his good pretty easily by the fact that he cannot hit stop and go targets. His radar is lock onto nearest person and charge - which against weaker melee guns and movement works great. The bots that hide in the corner and make small movements counter him well though. Dustbunny does well because it runs from him (and everyone else) :)

And work. Thanks for the good words! I am still attempting to get caught up with a new job and such. I do intend to keep track of things a bit better though going forward and maybe even update things as time allows.

I have a nano project that is currently stalled due to issues with my installation of Robocode, but looks very promising. It has three modes of movement, two of them reacting to enemy fire, and a PM gun.

The only problem is, I can't store .5 as a char, it gets rounded down to 0. So, I had to switch to 1 stored as a char and then divided by 2 to decode the value to a double. Then it was a few bytes over, so I had to switch from WeekendObsession's gun to Moebius's gun. But, in order to have any accuracy with that, I needed to add a setAdjustGunForRobotTurn(true);, which cost 5 bytes and still left me 2 bytes over. If you think you could help, I could post my code.

By the way, I recently helped Chase with his Talon project--a nano with MRM. But I have a feeling that there is a more effective way to implement wall avoidance...

BTW, I still feel very that LBB is a pretty cheezy bot. Abusing tables like that probably shouldn't be fair. It takes hours and hours though to get each bot optimized so maybe that makes it a little better overall. besting Moebius is a better accomplishment. At least he doesn't cheat...